Treasures from Southern Cemetery ……………..

Now there is a lot to say about Southern Cemetery and over the years I have done my fair share.*

Memorial to Satinik Kouyoumjian, 2013

It was opened in 1879, is still a municipally run cemetery which is the largest in Britain and the second largest in Europe.

Battered but still doing the biz, 2026

And like all those other Victorian public cemeteries, it is more than just a burial place.  

It is a place rich in history from the monuments of the great and good to the humbler gravestones, each with a story of which the inscriptions are clues to much more about the lives of those interred here.

Added to the reminders of those past lives there is an abundance of nature, from mature and not so mature trees to the abundance of wildlife.

For the Corporation who bought the 100-acre site in 1872 the grand plan was thwarted by drainage issues which put a hold on proceedings and involved the construction of a sewer to the river Mersey which was two miles away. **

It was indeed a very necessary project give than “water stood throughout the ground at about three below the surface and permeated the substratum of sand down to the clay about 15 feet deep”. *** 

Nor was this all because the in constructing the chapels workmen had to dig down to the clay levels and then build concrete piers and brick arches for the foundations to rest on.

Waiting for a paint job, 2026

All of which makes me ponder on the sagacity of the landowners who sold off the 100 acres, especially as a cursory glance of maps from the 1840s and 1850s show a fair a fair number of ponds and culverted water courses.

It's all in the detail, 2026

Outside the Jewish Cemetery, Southern Cemetery 2026

But enough of such doom and disappointment.

The civil engineering scheme was completed, the chapels built and the citizens of Manchester signed up for their little bit of eternal rest.

And now one hundred and forty-seven years later there is much to see, and on Monday after attending a funeral I took a walk and recorded some fine examples the railings that abut the wall of the cemetery running along Barlow Moor Road from the Crematorium all the way to Princess Parkway.

Like many I rarely even noticed them, but they are well worth looking at and remarkably despite layers of peeling paint they are in good condition.

Which is all I want to say.

Location; Southern Cemetery

Pictures; Memorial to Satinik Kouyoumjian, 2013, and those bits of iron, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Southern Cemetery, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Southern%20Cemetery & The Quirks of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, and Peter Topping, 2017

**The New Manchester Cemetery, The Manchester Guardian, May 23rd 1879

***ibid, The New Manchester Cemetery

Looking for the lost 32 cottages and 15 cellars, home to 208 people

Looking down Commercial Street, 2015

Now I first wandered down Commercial Street sometime in the 1980s looking for Omega Street, and its neighbours Alpha Street and Fogg’s Place.

And I must have missed them by just a few years.

That said I don’t think they would have featured in any glossy guide to comfortable inner city living.

In 1853 they had formed a complex of back to back housing consisting of 32 cottages and fifteen cellars inhabited by 208 people.*

Commercial  Omega Street, 1849

Directly opposite was the Egerton Mill, while behind them there were two more and the surrounding area was dominated by more textile mills, a handful of iron works and the Hulme Brewery.

And I doubt even the most optimistic estate agent could gloss over the noise from the nearby railway or the smell from the river Medlock which flowed in a curve close by.

Back in the 1980s you could still see the outline of the house walls in what at the time was a temporary car park but when I returned some 20 years later these had vanished under new tarmac and there was nothing left to show what had once been there.

Looking across to Omega Street from Commercial Street, 2002

Now another eighteen years on and the surrounding buildings had either been demolished or made genteel and the worst I suspect in the form of pollution comes from the noise of loud music in the flats opposite or the conversation of the office workers making their way home.

And even that car park is now boarded up which may soon mean even space inhabited by those three streets and 32 cottages will be lost for ever.

Location, Manchester

Pictures; Commercial Street, 2014 courtesy of Andy Robertson, Omega Street, 2003 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and area in 1849 from the OS for Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

* Report of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association 1853

When fast food predated the 20th century …..instant meals for the workers on our Victorian streets

We take for granted that breakfast was and still is for many something you have at home but this has not always been the case.  

Throughout history people and it does tend to be the poor have eaten out, often from fast food vendors and not I suspect always out of choice.

You can pick any one of a number of reasons, which usually come down to the early start of their day or the simple fact that the means to cook much in a shared room was limited.

Street food was available in Pompeii before it vanished under the ash of Vesuvius, and similar shops and stalls can be found across the Roman Empire, while Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851 devoted eighty-eight pages to the purveyors of almost every imaginable fast food, from fruit, fried fish, coffee and “green stuff”.”*

And tomorrow I will explore those London street sellers courtesy of Mr. Mayhew, but today I am revisiting The Victorian City, Everyday Life in Dickens’ London by Judith Flanders. **

I came across it back in 2012 and it is a prefect companion to that older survey of the capital’s eating habits.

Today eating out can be expensive and a life choice, but back in the early 19th century it was pretty much of a necessity.  Most of the working-class lived-in rooms of shared houses with just a fire place for rudimentary cooking extending to boiling a kettle or a pot of something, and anyway lighting a fire was a costly affair which would then continue to burn long after everyone had left for work.  

Added to which Likewise water was not always readily available and might only be obtained from a street pump and then not all the time.

By contrast on the way to work there were  coffee stalls which had the added bonus that in cold weather the mugs would warm the hands as well.

Some stalls were just simply a board laid over a pair of sawhorses and a can of coffee kept warm by a charcoal burner and others elaborate tent like structures.  A cup of coffee and “two thin” – two pieces of bread and butter might cost half a penny.

Nor was this way of life restricted to London.  Across Manchester and indeed all our cities and towns could be found similar fast food sellers

Picture;  Hot food on sale on the streets, the pictures date from the 1890s which takes them a little out of the time frame of the book, The Infirmary Corner at the top of Market Street, The Rovers Return, Shudehill, and Angel Meadow, by H.E. Tidmarsh from the book Manchester Old & New, Arthur William Shaw 1894

*Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, 1851

**Flanders, Judith, The Victorian City Everyday Life in Dickens’ 2012

So were you in the Eltham Hill Gaumont on Sunday September 12 1965?

Now you pretty much know it’s time to get a life when you go looking for the date for a film listing for the Eltham Hill Gaumont.

Eltham Hill Gaumont, 1998

The listing was posted recently by Kath May and advertised the four films showing for the week beginning September 12.

For those with time on their hands on that Sunday the cinema was showing for just the one day The Unknown with Dean Jagger and Teenage Frankenstein with Whit Bissell, Phyllis Coates and Gary Conway.

With titles like that they were of course X rated under the old Board of Censorship classification and if there was anyone still unsure the listing carried the warning Adults only.

Now I have never really given it much thought but I suppose Sunday in the cinema in the 1950s and 60s would be a slow day.

The cinema , circa 1938

Most people would have gone on a Friday or Saturday night and the week would be given over to a more discerning audience, leaving Sunday for those just over 18 with money left in their pockets and with a taste for the macabre.

For the rest of the week starting on the Monday and running for a full six days there was Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Last Train from Gun Hill which was an A and Yul Brynner in Escape from Zahrain.

I went looking for the plots of the four films and wish I hadn’t bothered.  Suffice to say that today I doubt that even the most desperate of TV executives would look to showing them on even the graveyard slot.

So as a reward and in answer to Kath’s musings of when this week was I went off and roamed the records.  

Film poster, 1957

Now the films themselves were no clue.  The Unknown dated from 1956, Teenage Frankenstein from the following year and Last Train from 1959 which left Escape from Zahrain which was made in 1962.

But given that you can on the internet find a day if you have the month and the year with just a little bit of fiddling it was possible to place Sunday September 12 in 1965.

Which just leaves me to record that the Gaumont had opened on April 14 1938 showing Queen Victoria with Anna Neagle and closed on June 19 1967 with David Niven in Happy Go Lovely and Dana Andrews in Duel in the Jungle.*

It reopened as a Mecca Bingo Club and the rest as they say is a down to two fat ladies and a joyful shout of Bingo.

But I wouldn't have done the job properly if I didn't also try to date the second picture of the cinema.

It was showing Will Hay's film Oh Mr Porter which was released in 1937 and so I am guessing it will be the late 1930s.

And that's all I am going to say except to thank Kath for finding and posting the film listing leaving me to go off and watch the paint dry on the back door.

Picture; the old cinema November 1998 courtesy of David Simpson and sometime before 1952, cousinadnab taken from Gaumont Eltham Hill, Cinema Treasures, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/14991 and film poster for Teenage Frankenstein, 1957 which is in the public domain

* Gaumont Eltham Hill, Cinema Treasures, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/14991

The 1893 Brass Band ............ lives revealed.

There has been a brass band in Chorlton since the 1820s which must make it one of the earliest.

 During the first half of the 19th century Chorlton was still a rural community and many of those who played in the band earned their living from the land and had been born in the township.

But as Chorlton grew and attracted new people who made their living from other trades so the composition of the band changed.

 And it was the chance discovery of a photograph of the band dated 1893 which has revealed the story of this band. It has been possible to track almost all of the men from that picture. Most had not been born here and some still lived elsewhere.

They were clerks and warehouseman, with just a few still working on the farms and market gardens.

Like many bands ours was a close knit group with a few families supplying many of those who played, and again like other brass bands these men lived close together, concentrated off Crossland Road and Beech Road.

Picture; from  the collection of Alan Brown,1893

The Tale at Eltham …….

Now I really wish I knew just what the “Tale at Eltham" was, but alas it is lost.

Nor I suspect did anyone know just what had gone on in Eltham in the October of 1917 when this picture postcard was sent to Miss Goddard of Sussex.

I can tell you that it was sent at 2.30 in the afternoon, but can’t make out from where it was posted.

Nor can I really be sure that the sender or Miss Goddard had any connection with Eltham, which leave me wondering if it had been the two “young things” that caught the attention of Eliza who sent it.

But then these picture postcards were standard fare, with the company merely over printing different destinations to attract local audiences.

Some where in the collection I have another with a different place name.

The message on the back is difficult to read but hints a at a boat trip and an admonishment that Miss Goddard hadn’t written recently.

So that is it, a little bit of 1917 which might or might not have a connection with Eltham.

Location; Suffolk and maybe Eltham

Picture; The Tale at Eltham, 1917, from the collection of David Harrop

The story of a strike and of strikes yet to come, part two .... a Chorlton postcard

On Newton street in July 1911

The Carters came out on strike in Manchester at the beginning of July 1911. 

It was the picture of police escorting a strike breaker which first caught my interest.

But they were not the first or the last during the next few years to withdraw their labour to advance a demand for better pay and conditions.

Early in 1912 the miners had come out following a ballot “in favour of giving notice to establish the principle of a minimum wage for every man and boy working underground,”* and at the beginning of March Manchester Municipal workers voted to follow those of Stalybridge, Salford and Stockport and strike for higher pay.

You can get a sense of the mounting conflict from the newspapers of the period. The Manchester Guardian was quick to comment on the concerns over coal stocks in the Greater Manchester area just weeks after the miners had come out, and carried reports that in Nottingham the bakers and painters were about to go on strike while in Manchester there was serious disruption to the rail network.

Leonard's fears

And here in Chorlton on the day the Guardian reported that 60% of trains from one Manchester railway station had been “knocked off” Leonard wrote to a friend of his worries about his mother’s illness and that “all our staff intend to come out on strike this weekend.”

Now it may never be possible to discover the business that he ran or what happened on Friday March 15th when the strike was due to start, but I shall endeavour to try.

He was “busy making arrangements to fill their places” and thought that “this Coal crisis ..... is a terrible affair.” 

All of which rather eclipsed his pleasure that at the Parliamentary bye-election earlier in the year “our man got in (Good old Blue) turned a liberal majority from over 2,000 to a conservative one of 500, great excitement.”

It is a fascinating glimpse on how people here in Chorlton looked out on the mounting political and industrial unrest and sadly represents the only comment we have so far.

As it was the strikes rumbled on through the year, but more about them tomorrow.

Picture; detail of a postcard sent on March 12th 1912 from the Lloyd collection, detail from the Carter's strike, courtesy of the Greater Manchester Police Museum

*Balllot paper issued by the Miner’s Federation of Great Britain, January 1912